Former prime minister George Papandreou asking for financial help in 2010, and now on the lucrative international speech circuit .

Three years of collective failure

On 23 April 2010, the prime minister of the day George Papandreou appealed for international help to prevent Greece's collapse. But the three years that followed saw a series of blunders by the Troika and the Greek state, according to a series of economic analyses.

Published on 25 April 2013 at 11:39
Former prime minister George Papandreou asking for financial help in 2010, and now on the lucrative international speech circuit .

Three years ago, then Prime Minister George Papandreou stood on Kastelorizo’s harbour as the Aegean glistened in the background and children yelped with joy. The ensuing period has proved anything but sun-kissed child’s play for Greece. The appeal made by Papandreou to the Eurozone and the International Monetary Fund that day has set the tone for almost everything that has happened in Greece over the past three years. Where it will lead is far from clear.

Even though the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF make up the troika of lenders that have provided Greece with some €200bn in bailout funding during the last 36 months, the Washington-based organisation’s role has grabbed the attention of most Greeks. Even now, April 23, 2010 is referred to by many as the day Papandreou “sent Greece to the IMF”. Even though the Fund has provided only a fraction of the loans disbursed so far, its actions often come under the greatest scrutiny.

Although there has been a growing realisation that some of Greece’s partners in the Eurozone and the ECB have been behind some of the troika’s toughest demands, the IMF continues to be a regular target for critics.

IMF Trojan horse

The problem is that these often indiscriminate attacks, dismissing the IMF as Trojan Horse for neoliberalism, mean that proper analysis of the troika’s three elements is pushed aside. In this fog, it has become difficult to work out where there are grounds for genuine criticism of the IMF. In this respect, an op-ed by Mohamed El-Erian, the CEO of PIMCO investment firm, on the Fund’s shortcomings is timely and extremely useful.

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El-Erian stresses that the IMF’s key weakness has been its susceptibility to political manipulation. The PIMCO chief is also critical of the Fund’s role in the Cyprus bailout. El-Erian’s firm was responsible for auditing Cypriot banks ahead of the loan package being agreed between Nicosia and the troika. He said the aborted initial solution and the revised plan showed “insufficient understanding and analysis of the complexities of the country’s problems.”

“In both cases, and in other similar circumstances elsewhere in Europe (including Greece), I suspect that the IMF felt it had no choice but to succumb to pressure by European politicians,” adds El-Erian. “But in doing so, it has risked more than its credibility and standing.”

These are all issues - particularly the matter of credibility - that are picked up on by Gabriel Sterne, the chief economist at Exotix. Sterne, a former IMF employee, published last week probably the most comprehensive assessment of where the Fund has got it wrong over the last three years. His policy discussion paper has some extremely salient points for Greece.

Off-target analysis

Sterne begins by pointing out that the IMF's analysis, which El-Erian correctly lauded, has been somewhat off target in Greece's case.

"Greece has endured the largest but by no means the only forecast errors; errors which can be explained by the dismal algebra of credit crunch + austerity = output collapse," writes Sterne, underlying the fact that the Greek programme has not just gone awry because of what has – or hasn’t – happened in Athens over the last three years.

The troika persistently argues that the slow pace of reforms has been at fault for the deeper-than-expected recession, while consistently side-stepping questions about whether the rapid pace of fiscal adjustment has pulled the rug from under the Greek economy.

Sterne argues that a failure to address Greece's towering public debt from the start has proved a damaging miscalculation and one not in keeping with the IMF's credo. Soon after Papandreou's Kastelorizo speech, the IMF projected that Greek debt would reach 139 per cent by the end of 2011 but by the time of the troika's fifth quarterly review, Greek debt had reached 160 per cent of GDP, despite the fact that more than €100bn in loans had been disbursed.

"There is a strong case to be made that the bailout, by prolonging the crisis without taking firm action, did more harm than good and an equally strong case that this was to be expected,” writes Sterne, who adds that the Fund “broke one of its most essential rules by supporting a programme in Greece in May 2010, which was inadequate to secure sustainability."

Biting the bullet

Greece and the troika would have been much better off biting the debt restructuring bullet from the start rather than addressing the issue in 2012, the analyst argues. Crucially, Sterne points out that some profited from the decision not to tackle Greek debt, much of which was in the hands of European banks, right from the start.

The economist's concluding verdict on the “pretend and extend” strategy that followed Papandreou's speech is damning. “Ultimately, the Greek procrastination was fruitless. Private lenders to Greece suffered a scalping, Greece has not had a bank that lends since mid-2011, youth unemployment is 60 per cent and the ECB had to intervene massively to keep swathes of the European banking system afloat."

Like El-Erian, Sterne says the IMF buckled in the face of political pressure from Eurozone countries and made a series of diagnostic errors.

Three years on from Kastelorizo, there is still much for Greece to do. It has executed the most dramatic fiscal adjustment in OECD history but some desperately needed reforms are still in the works. This, however, does not take away from the fact the Greek programme was ill-conceived and badly implemented by all sides.

In this respect, it is vital to understand the roles that each of the three elements in the troika have played and where their weaknesses and stubbornness may lie. Launching indiscriminate attacks on the IMF or the others simply allows the troika to hide behind the received wisdom that the programme's shortcomings were only down to Greece's slow implementation.

If we are going to come to terms with the legacy of the Kastelorizo speech, a more nuanced approach is needed.

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